Call It Must-Buy TV

With “The Sopranos,” TV’s Great American Novel, and “Sex and the City,” a hit comedy of manners, orgasms and women’s shoes, HBO has become the literary magazine of series television. Serialized within its pages are “Oz,” Tom Fontana’s innovative, brutal look at prison life, and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” an improvised piece of whimsy from Larry David, the author of “Seinfeld.”

As the pay cable network’s ad campaign now tells us: “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” Embedded in this slogan is another message: If it’s not HBO, it’s TV--TV in all its pandering, compromised glory. These are good times to be arguing for artistic bankruptcy among the major networks, whose latest achievements don’t even include professional actors or actual scripts. Brands have given way to quick-fix schemes--whether it’s NBC investing in the high-jiggle football league the XFL or ABC papering over its dearth of scripted development with a game show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Because most of the economic forces that push the networks toward creative panhandling--namely, censors and the drive to capture the biggest audience--don’t exist at HBO, the writer-producer of a series there can actually claim to be doing art for art’s sake. The freedom implies a certain arrogance--you’re not in the TV business, you’re in the HBO business.

It’s an image that continues to gall many in the broadcast television business who marvel at the no-strings-attached buzz that HBO generates. Have the media become conditioned to perceive an HBO series as inherently better, responding more to the pay channel’s attractive packaging than the series’ actual content? The critical fawning over HBO series was spoofed last year on “Saturday Night Live,” with a commercial intoning mock blurbs for “The Sopranos”: “If I had a choice between having all the mysteries of the universe revealed to me in a glorious flash of light or watching one episode of ‘The Sopranos,’ I’d hesitate, then I’d watch ‘The Sopranos.’ ”

Meanwhile, network rivals gnash their teeth when “The Sopranos” or “Sex and the City” claims an Emmy or Golden Globe. HBO may be hitting home runs, the argument goes, but how come nobody points out it’s playing with aluminum bats?

“If NBC only had to schedule ‘The West Wing,’ ‘Law & Order,’ ‘ER’ and ‘Friends,’ you’d say, ‘Wow, they’re the boutique network,’ ” says a veteran TV writer who declined to be named, echoing a commonly held view. Indeed, with uncut movies filling up the lion’s share of HBO’s broadcast day, the channel is at liberty to be thoughtful and exclusive, ordering 10 or 13 episodes of a series and calling it a season. All the while, its commercial network counterparts scramble each year to fill out schedules, ordering series they only half-believe in and deficit-financing star vehicles that end up being expensive embarrassments.

These days, thanks in large measure to three series--”The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” which still airs on HBO in reruns--an increasing number of writers and performers are seeking admission to the HBO club, where the reward is more cachet than cash, because HBO series have yet to prove they can reap financial windfalls in syndication, a la “Seinfeld” or “Friends.”

But what, finally, makes for an HBO series? And who fits the brand?

You could argue that the prototypical HBO writer-producer is Alan Ball, Oscar-winning screenwriter of “American Beauty,” and the prototypical HBO subject is death--something the broadcast networks wouldn’t touch. Ball’s new HBO series, “Six Feet Under,” premiering in June, is about the business of burying people, seen through a family-run funeral service. The darkly comic pedigree of the series matches Ball’s pedigree, which in turn fits the HBO brand: jaded former playwright who grew frustrated with his high-paying, joke-to-joke-to-joke jobs in network TV and wrote what became a mainstream literary hit at the box office.

HBO says it has about 40 scripts in development--everything from a series about hip-hop culture by novelist John Ridley to a comedy about an upscale Los Angeles Realtor (the project, based on the Manhattan Transfers column in the New York Observer, had Janeane Garofalo attached to star, but she has since backed out). There is also a domestic-sitcom idea from comedian Damon Wayans. The script was pitched as a realistic version of the false, feel-good stories conventional network sitcoms churn out, which is interesting given that Wayans stars in one of those, “My Wife and Kids,” a midseason entry on ABC.

Both hip-hop and high-stakes real estate epitomize the HBO milieu. Marry such a subculture and a flawed, dynamic main character, and you evidently approximate the HBO brand. One writer in development there summed up the feedback he got on his pilot script this way: Make your main character less likable, and don’t worry about premise. “Just plop us in the world and we’ll find our way,” he was told.

Such notes run decidedly counter to the broadcast networks, where executives usually want likable characters or premises that are apparent early on. It’s a compromised process that can yield uncompromised riches down the road. At HBO, the riches are compromised, but the process isn’t.

“The best way to work at HBO is like Larry [David] does, if you’ve already made a ton of money and you want to do a show your way,” says longtime comedy writer-producer Chris Thompson, who has worked at the broadcast networks and HBO. “But if you’re 35 and you’ve got three small kids, and you want to make a pile [of money] and buy a house at the beach, you don’t sell a show to HBO.”

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As HBO tends to characterize its series development, none of the scripts is more than the germ of an inspiration: novels-in-progress that HBO’s writers-in-residence (Eric Bogosian, for instance) may or may not produce. Star power is important, but it doesn’t carry the day. HBO has passed on a western miniseries from director Sydney Pollack, for example, and a series about an actor called “Kilroy” from George Clooney.

But that’s not to say the HBO development process isn’t above the same politics and marketeering that plague broadcast network programming. HBO, for instance, puts its pilots through audience testing, though arguably not as slavishly as the broadcast networks do. And sources say the channel has spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to develop a companion series to “Sex and the City,” an indication that target audiences have crept into HBO’s thinking.

“My biggest fear is that they’ll develop [a brand],” says Bob Odenkirk, a writer and performer with a development deal at HBO and the star for four seasons with David Cross of the HBO sketch comedy series “Mr. Show.” To Odenkirk, the channel’s growing mainstream popularity is both blessing and curse. “If you attract this whole big crowd of people, you’re going to want to keep them. And to keep them you have to give them what brought them there” in the first place, he says.

Last year, HBO made four pilots, including an Odenkirk comedy called “The Near Future.” Out of those, HBO picked up two--the hourlong drama “Six Feet Under” and “The Mind of the Married Man,” a half-hour comedy created by stand-up comic-turned-filmmaker Mike Binder. Though it was in development before “Sex and the City” became a hit, the Binder series, which premieres in August, is bound to be perceived as a male response, given that its three main characters are married men in various stages of thought about love and infidelity.

“‘Sex and the City’ isn’t real--it’s a fairy-tale release for women,” argues Binder. “This show is the naked truth.”

There were concerns at HBO that Binder wasn’t the right person to star, just as there are concerns that “Six Feet Under” is too morose to catch on like “The Sopranos” did. One thing, though, is certain: They are not just shows. They are HBO shows, and they will be marketed accordingly.

“It’s all about enhancing the brand identity, and there’s no amount of money spared to do that,” says a source familiar with how the network operates. This enhancing of the brand means unveiling new and returning series with proper aplomb. It means turning the third-season premiere of the Mafia drama “The Sopranos,” which returns March 4, into a media-hyped event at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. It means spending big bucks on marquee projects like “From the Earth to the Moon,” the $70-million miniseries about the Apollo space program executive-produced by Tom Hanks, and “Band of Brothers,” a $120-million, 10-part World War II miniseries from Hanks and Steven Spielberg that premieres in September.

It involves balancing art with the entertainment industry’s ceaseless vanity reflex--advertising HBO product year-round on the side of a towering office building on the Sunset Strip.

Most especially, it means selling your network to the public not as a content provider, but as a lifestyle choice, really, like making time for yoga.

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Asked to define what makes an HBO series, Jay Kogen, an Emmy-winning former “Frasier” writer (and someone who’s pitched to HBO), says: “You can’t find this on network TV, and Chris likes it.”

Chris is Chris Albrecht, and he is an anomaly--a programming chief who has been at his network for nearly 15 years, after past lives as a starving actor, a comic, an agent, and a comedy-club owner and manager.

Indeed, Albrecht’s tenure running the Improv in New York presaged the kingmaker role he has come to occupy at HBO. Being in a comedy club night after night after night refined Albrecht’s comedic tastes; indeed, if anything gives HBO its unique culture, it’s that so many of those now in business there have deep roots with Albrecht dating to the fertile New York comedy club scene of the 1970s and ‘80s, when the likes of Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman were battling for mike time, and fledgling managers were forming career-making alliances. Albrecht, 48, was firmly a part of this world, and his friendships in Hollywood today reflect it.

“We would see him six nights a week,” says Larry David, one of the Improv’s regular comics at the time. “To comedians, [club managers] were the most powerful figures,” David says. “They were in control of your destiny. If they put you on and you got spots, you might have a career in show business.”

David went on to have quite a career in show business, creating “Seinfeld” with Jerry Seinfeld and running it for seven seasons. In high demand after leaving the show, he instead chose to film a comedy special for HBO, an improvised documentary in which he returned to stand-up.

Even before his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” special aired, HBO offered David a series, and he accepted. This, say HBO supporters, is an indication of how streamlined the decision-making can be--and how instinctively the work is judged. But just as assuredly, HBO wanted to be the place that published David’s follow-up to “Seinfeld.”

In “Curb,” which returns for its second season in August, you have a typical HBO show, which is to say it’s both loved and hated, but, more important, too iconoclastic to be compared to anything on a major network. Nor does David receive much input, beyond turning in episode outlines to Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss, HBO’s senior vice president of original programming. (Last season, there was some objection to an incest story line played for laughs, but David didn’t take it out.)

On the one hand, you could argue that David, having co-created a billion-dollar enterprise in “Seinfeld,” would have been given tremendous creative latitude at a network. But at least part of what brought him to HBO goes back decades.

“That’s probably Chris’ biggest asset--he was a friend for years to all these guys,” says Bob Zmuda, who briefly had an Improv act with Albrecht and now runs the charity Comic Relief. “This wasn’t some slick manager or agent coming your way. This was a friend. His whole relationship at HBO has been built on those friendships and one hand washing the other.”

The metaphor comes back in other ways when you ask people about Albrecht. It’s as if he’s not in the programming business so much as the loyalty business, with only two or three degrees of separation between Albrecht’s past and his current Hollywood dealings.

“I look at Tony Soprano, and to me it’s Chris Albrecht, in so many ways,” says an executive familiar with Albrecht who declined to be named. “His toughness, but also the humanity. He’s not your typical network development schmuck. He has a much deeper understanding of the world. . . . He’s a textured, somewhat complicated individual. On the other hand, there’s a real animal there.”

Sitting in his corner office, 42 floors up at HBO’s Century City headquarters, Albrecht smiles at the Tony Soprano comparison. He dismisses the image of HBO as a club, composed of comedians and managers from his Improv days--David, Binder, Robert Wuhl, star of “Arli$$.”

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In a way, these comics were always on hand, back in the days when Michael Fuchs was the architect of HBO original programming and the network was heavily in the stand-up comedy business, banking countless one-hour specials but notoriously frugal with original series. Albrecht rose steadily through the ranks, assuming the top programming job ahead of the network’s current growth spurt.

Last year, HBO added 1.2 million subscribers, bringing its total base to about 26 million viewers (36 million if you include sister channel Cinemax). The increase has helped make HBO a key part of the nearly $7 billion in TV revenue its corporate parent, AOL-Time Warner, reported last year.

There is too much at stake nowadays, Albrecht notes, for him simply to hand shows to his old friends in comedy. Nor, he says, is there any HBO zeitgeist, necessarily. There is simply the mandate to be “good and different,” not to do what the networks do. After that, everything else is up to the writer, he says.

But at least some of it is up to Albrecht. Binder’s “The Mind of the Married Man,” for instance, was in and out of development for years. Strauss, for one, was not a supporter, particularly when the project, then-called “My Dirty Little Mind,” dwelt on men’s sexual fantasies. But Albrecht kept the door open. “It wasn’t so much ‘Let’s make the pilot,’ but ‘Let’s give him the chance to take the big swing,’ ” Albrecht says of Binder, who has starred in and directed several independent films, including “The Sex Monster,” which was honored several years ago at the HBO-sponsored U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. “That’s where his relationship with me helped. . . . It’s not favoritism at all. I mean, first of all, Mike’s always made me laugh. You know, most people who get involved in comedy, they don’t have the background of a Larry. Larry David was a stand-up comedian, a writer, an actor on a late-night show, a TV producer. He’s a 50-some-odd-year-old grown-up. And Mike, especially, is a serious professional.”

By the same token, Albrecht says, he came out of a budget meeting in New York two years ago resolved to cancel “Arli$$,” which premiered in 1996 and stars Wuhl as a sports agent. The show has never generated ratings, even by HBO’s standards (about 2 million viewers per airing last season), but it has also never brought HBO the kind of accolades that make ratings a moot issue. In fact, it is as close to a ridiculed show as HBO has. Asked what prevented him from dropping the show, Albrecht instead tells a story: He left that budget meeting and headed to Westchester County to look at a pony for his daughter. On the way, he was on the phone with business affairs, discussing the “Arli$$” cancellation, and when they reached the stables, the driver couldn’t help himself. He was begging Albrecht not to cancel the series.

“Believe me,” Albrecht says, “there are people that are paying for HBO every month that don’t watch ‘The Sopranos’ and don’t watch ‘Sex and the City’ and don’t watch ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ that think that ‘Arli$$’ is the best comedy on television.”

“Arli$$” returns for a sixth season in June, airing Sunday nights at 9:30, after “Sex and the City.” To the casual viewer, an HBO series often seems to appear out of the ether--showing up on HBO (or HBO Plus, HBO Signature or HBO Latino, among the new channels now part of HBO premium packages) seemingly without any set pattern. And because HBO series are played repeatedly throughout the week on the various platforms, it can be difficult to construe any programming strategy.

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The goal now is to schedule original series and miniseries on Sunday nights year-round--to be able, in other words, to segue from a new season of “Oz” to “The Sopranos” to “Sex and the City.” “Six Feet Under,” Albrecht says, will probably be used to launch Wednesdays as a night for new series as well.

In the course of this, HBO, under CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, is spending close to $400 million now on original programming, Albrecht says. September will bring “Band of Brothers,” the Hanks/Spielberg miniseries based on the book by historian Stephen Ambrose. But while miniseries, original movies, documentaries and specials fall under the original programming rubric, the scripted series have increasingly come to define the HBO brand. Cable outlets such as Showtime, TNT and A&E; have shown an ability to compete with HBO’s original movies and documentaries. But no channels--including Showtime, with its “Look-at-how-edgy-we’ve-gotten” series about gay life, “Queer as Folk”--has been able to match HBO’s branded identity in series.

To be sure, HBO has had its failures--the 1996 comedy “The High Life,” for instance, a spoof of the 1950s shot in black and white. And even the network’s returning series can vanish without a trace of PR fallout, as when Chris Rock ended his late-night talk show, “The Chris Rock Show,” in December without so much as an on-air announcement.

Certainly, one of the easiest ways to demonstrate that you’re “not TV” is to employ nudity, violence and profanity, something that nearly all HBO original series employ. This is particularly true of reality shows like “G-string Divas,” a behind-the-scenes look at stripper life, and “Real Sex,” a home-movies peek into all manner of sexual appetites. The argument gets Albrecht going, because he’s heard it so often. Yeah, he says, there’s violence on “The Sopranos” and “Oz,” and frontal nudity on “Sex and the City,” but it’s only used in the service of the scripts, not for adult males on their couches at night, surfing the cable channels for skin.

“We don’t look for things that are taboo,” he adds. “One of the reasons we’ve held off doing a cop show is I’m not sure that we could do something better than ‘NYPD Blue’ or ‘Law & Order.’ . . . Because there’ve been so many things done on broadcast networks over the years, it’s hard to find subjects. I mean ‘Arli$$’--sports. Because of all of their contracts with the major leagues, [the networks] aren’t going to do real stories about what happens in sports. It’s not taboo in society; it happens to be taboo for a business reason for them. I mean, [the former ABC comedy] ‘Sports Night’ had nothing to do with sports.”

No one denies that HBO’s economic model has contributed mightily to its success. Unlike the broadcast networks, HBO derives its revenue from subscribers, not advertisers--from people paying monthly fees of about $12 over their basic-cable bills. This means HBO’s writer-producers don’t have to fear the long arm of a standards and practices department. Nor are the network’s executives in the “eyeballs business”--industry-speak for trying to attract the most viewers. Instead, HBO uses its hit series to keep the percentage of “churn” in the single digits--those viewers who buy the service and then cancel when a show’s run ends.

For the final episode of its second season, “The Sopranos” drew an estimated 9 million viewers, unprecedented for an HBO series and astounding compared with the averages of HBO’s other series last year: “Arli$$” at 1.9 million viewers, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” at 1.2 million viewers, “Oz” at 1.7 million viewers, and “Sex and the City” at 2.6 million viewers per airing.

By contrast, NBC’s “Friends” averages more than 20 million viewers each week. This is something of an apples-to-oranges comparison, because HBO is only carried in a quarter of the U.S. homes that have access to NBC. There are other caveats, but ultimately the viewer at home knows just two things--that both “Friends” and “Sex and the City” are hits, and to get from one to the other you need only flip the channel. Everything else that might differentiate their success is for Hollywood to quarrel about.

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“I say this in a lot of meetings,” says HBO’s Strauss. “The shows have to become a little bit bigger than themselves . . . something that resonates in a larger way. I think that our best shows do that.”

Like Albrecht, Strauss, who oversees original series, is an HBO lifer. In 1986, shortly after graduating from Harvard, Strauss took a job temping at HBO in New York; she has been with the network ever since.

Strauss’ office is just down the hall from Albrecht’s--within shouting distance almost. If Albrecht is HBO’s front man, Strauss prefers to stay behind the curtain, a faceless name mentioned in Emmy acceptance speeches but not someone who relishes an interview. (When Rosie O’Donnell appeared recently on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” Strauss was her phone-a-friend lifeline.) She is careful, even remote--someone whose point of view must be gleaned from other sources. Like Albrecht, Strauss did hard time in the comedy clubs scouting talent in the 1980s, and like Albrecht, she is well-respected for her intelligence and taste, for “getting it.”

“As much as people might understand what it is we’re looking for, it’s the execution that is so key,” she says. “You could have done ‘Sex and the City’ for a network, but it wouldn’t have been the right show for us. . . . I think a lot of times you’re pitched an idea, and it comes back and it missed. And it’s because whoever’s doing it didn’t have that vision and voice and the means to execute it that works for us.”

Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy evidently didn’t have it; in 1999, the pair, who collaborated on the cult movie comedies “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show,” shot a pilot called “DOA,” about two B-list theatrical agents, that HBO passed on. Albrecht and Strauss also passed on a pilot called “Lloyd: What Happened,” a comedy about corporate business based on a novel by Stanley Bing (the novel was brought to HBO’s attention by Hanks). The “Lloyd: What Happened” pilot was written by Peter Tolan, whose credits include “Larry Sanders” and the feature “Analyze This,” and it was directed by Harold Ramis, director of “Groundhog Day,” among others. But HBO was ultimately unhappy with the cast and the tone of the pilot.

“We never cracked what was great about the book,” Albrecht says, conceding that in the process HBO “drove Tolan crazy.” Tolan, who is currently the executive producer of “The Job,” on ABC, declined an interview request.

“I think ‘The Sopranos’ really helped HBO figure out what it was in terms of series television,” says Walon Green. Several years ago, Green, a writer formerly on “NYPD Blue” and “Law & Order,” was developing the pilot “L.A. Confidential” at HBO, based on the crime noir novel and well-received movie. But then “The Sopranos” debuted, and that changed everything. “The response to ‘The Sopranos’ was, it’s cutting edge, there’s nothing else like it [on TV]. And they said, ‘Wait a minute, we’re developing a cop show that’s off of a movie?’ ”

“Six Feet Under” began in-house, with Strauss thinking HBO should explore death in a series. She’d been reading Jessica Mitford’s “The American Way of Death Revisited,” and she had watched “The Loved One,” the 1965 black comedy based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh.

“I started to think, ‘Is there a way to do something about death that could be darkly comic?’ This is interesting for us, because other places wouldn’t do it.”

Strauss took her idea around town and mentioned it to Ball, who was not only hot off of “American Beauty,” but also coming from a lousy network experience, with his ABC sitcom, “Oh, Grow Up.” Ball wrote a script, gave it to Strauss and was told to make it darker. “He was still coming out of his ABC experience, so it still had some more conventional sensibilities in there,” Strauss says.

Ball says development at HBO was everything his experience at ABC wasn’t. He ought to be a convert--HBO picked up 13 episodes of “Six Feet Under” the weekend after viewing his pilot, says Bob Greenblatt, one of the show’s executive producers.

“It seems like there’s less levels of bureaucracy to dig through,” says Ball. “Many times, the lower-level people I would deal with at the networks, I felt like they were second-guessing what their higher-ups would say or think. Whereas when I talk to Carolyn, it’s all what she thinks.”

Adds writer-producer Thompson: “It’s just as hard to make a bad show [at a network] as it is a good show [at HBO]. To make a good show on HBO is almost easier work. You’re living and dying by what you believe in, and you’re not being nibbled to death by ducks.”

The sentiment is echoed by most who’ve been in development at HBO, but not everyone. Last year, Steven Bochco, the TV titan behind such classics as “Hill Street Blues,” “L.A. Law” and “NYPD Blue,” discussed doing a drama about marriage on HBO, but the deal eventually fell through. “Ironically, HBO didn’t give up creative control, and I didn’t feel comfortable ceding the kind of control that I’ve had for 20 years in broadcasting,” Bochco told the New York Times (he declined to comment for this article).

But Albrecht said the sticking points with Bochco were about financial, not creative, control. And he suggests another reason high-powered TV writers shy away from HBO--they don’t have an onerous network to blame when things go awry. “If they fail, they’re not as good as David Chase or Tom Fontana or Darren Star,” Albrecht says, referring to the creators of “The Sopranos,” “Oz” and “Sex and the City,” respectively. “So why take that risk?”

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Brad Grey has been in business with Albrecht since 1977, when Grey, then a student at the University of Buffalo and a budding talent manager, was booking a Buffalo comedy club and Albrecht was running the Improv. Back then, what Grey needed from Albrecht was headline comics. Their association has since involved the two most important entries in HBO’s series television evolution--”The Sopranos” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” starring Garry Shandling, which debuted in 1990.

Grey was Shandling’s manager, on board as an executive producer for the series’ six-year run. “Sanders,” in which Shandling played the fictional host of a late-night talk show, not only drew the kind of unabashed critical praise HBO treasures, it also attracted writers to HBO--writers willing to trade huge upfront payments and back-end profits for the cachet of publishing alongside a smart, self-referential show. “Sanders” was never a ratings-getter (like “Arli$$,” it averaged about 2 million viewers, which would put it among the lowest-rated shows in prime time). But the series did give HBO what previous series--whether Robert Altman’s “Tanner: ‘88” or Billy Crystal’s “Sessions”--failed to supply.

What “Sanders” won’t do for HBO, however, is generate huge revenue. Sony’s Columbia TriStar, which owns the rights to the series, is now selling “Sanders” into syndication, but it won’t draw anything like the back-end profits of a “Seinfeld” or “Frasier.” (HBO is rerunning episodes, and “Sanders” will also air on cable’s Bravo in 2002).

The show’s fallible economic model was what prompted Grey to shop “The Sopranos” to all the major networks before turning to HBO. What he wanted, this time, was a critical and financial hit. “Well, I’ll just say it again, that was a mistake, because I shouldn’t have taken it to those other companies,” Grey says. “I thought at that point, after ‘Sanders’ and after some of the success of HBO, that the networks would embrace a show like ‘The Sopranos’ and give us more leeway creatively.”

Shot on location in New Jersey (and with a star, James Gandolfini, signed to a $10-million contract), “The Sopranos” is HBO’s most expensive show. The network finances the series, and Brad Grey Television also has an ownership position in the show. Though “The Sopranos” clearly has the best chance to reap huge sums should an edited version be sold back to independent stations, Grey isn’t counting his chickens. Recently, HBO Enterprises, HBO’s syndication arm, began offering an edited version of “Sex and the City” to basic cable stations, reportedly at $750,000 an episode, which approaches the astronomical fees garnered in syndication by “Seinfeld.” But the offer was taken off the table amid sentiment that the asking price was exorbitant.

Albrecht offers another rationale for keeping the series in-house. “As the world gets more competitive, and as these series are the things that define us, why would we give them to someone else unless we really needed the money?”

Sometimes too HBO loses properties before they reach fruition. It happened with “Sledge Hammer!,” a spoof detective comedy Alan Spencer developed for HBO in 1985 before the series landed on ABC. And three years ago, HBO appeared to be in business on a comedy pilot called “Action,” about a movie studio chief modeled after hard-driving producer Joel Silver. Albrecht says he came up with the germ of the idea and went to Silver, who brought in Thompson, creator of network sitcoms (“The Naked Truth”) and a writer for “Larry Sanders.” Thompson pitched a first season that would follow a movie from conception to premiere. HBO wanted Oliver Platt to play the producer.

But Thompson and Silver ended up taking the series to Fox, where “Action” landed on the fall 2000 schedule (starring Jay Mohr, not Platt), and died halfway into its first season.

Thompson says that the show would have been ideal for HBO, but that “there were too many heavy-hitter profit participants in it to make a deal.” But it’s also true that Silver and Thompson--and, by extension, Columbia TriStar, where they were under contract--saw a far bigger pot at the end of the rainbow if “Action” landed at a broadcast network.

This has become a familiar predicament whenever HBO tries to get into business with writer-producers who have lucrative studio commitments: Deals die on the vine over ownership rights. “Us owning shows only comes from the fact that in order to get some things done, we needed to fully finance them, since no one is willing to deficit them,” says Albrecht. “Well, if you’re going to fully finance it, you should own it.”

But what is owning “The Sopranos” worth ultimately? This would be easier to determine if “The Sopranos” were to be sold into syndication, a subject Albrecht and Grey are naturally cagey about. Beyond the task of making the series palatable to a wider audience, there is another question: Wouldn’t letting “The Sopranos” go to a basic cable outlet like TBS diminish the distinction of the HBO brand?

Keeping “The Sopranos” in the family can only become more crucial for a network having to live up to its boutique image with each new series. Surely, HBO can count on the broadcast networks to continue their compromised ways. The task for HBO is to keep proving that it’s not, you know, TV.